Sea Parting Festival

Okay, so it’s been a while. I have had several little outings between my last post and now, but I’m kind of going to breeze over them in an attempt to catch up to the present. One day we went to a folk village that is 20 minutes outside of Suncheon. It’s the same idea as Upper Canada Village, but way bigger and not as many demonstrations going on. One Sunday we went for a stroll along the river downtown where there are paintings all along one side of it. I also tried out the swan paddle boats….I think one of the rudders were broken because we could not turn that thing to the right! It may have been the drivers too I suppose :p. As a bonus we made a friend…yes we found her in the river and we weren’t sure if she had fallen in or was taking a bath. Turns out she has a few loose screws and was actually taking a bath. Apparently one of us made eye contact and she felt comfortable enough to follow us, continuously speak Korean, and oh yeah…tap me on the shoulder! I jolted my shoulder out of her reach and said a surprised “whoooo-aaah!”. I felt like a snob, but I just REALLY wasn’t expecting it, plus I had just bought this nice yellow shirt with shamrocks on it for St patricks Day in March (it’s still good for through out the year wear too) which I was wearing and I didn’t really care for dirty river hands on it. On another Saturday we went to Gwangju (it’s about 1.5 away) for some shopping and just a change of scenery.

As a side note, when I say “we” it pretty much always includes Kristina (from Manchester) and Joanne (from Ireland). Occasionally the head teacher and my fellow Canadian, Jess, will come with us.

This past weekend, Kristina and I went to the Jindo Sea Parting Festival. It is basically a low tide between Jindo Island and Modo Island, but it was supposed to be pretty spectacular. At it’s lowest point, hoards of people walk across the 2.8km long “Mystic Sea Road”. It ended up not parting all the way and the police turned everyone around, but it was still kind of cool to see, plus we bought some pretty sweet rubber boots to truck around in…we felt pretty hard core. The rest of the festival was mainly food booths with a couple of exhibition tents I guess you could call them. You could make your own seaweed sheets or listen to some traditional drum music while the older people danced directly in the path of all other festival goers. We stayed until Sunday, but not late enough for the tide to go out again (it happens between 4 and 5) because we wanted to make sure we caught our bus home and last buses here are ridiculously early. I think it’s because a lot of the ppl travelling are older…all the students are trapped studying I guess and don’t really travel as much as us young ppl would at home.

This weekend we have a long weekend!!!! 4 days long to be exact J. I’m looking forward to the change of schedule. We are planning on going to a butterfly festival on Saturday, having a day of rest on Sunday, then doing a bit of a road trip with a couple of the Korean teachers on Monday and Tuesday. The long weekend is because of Children’s Day which falls on Tuesday. The school gave us Monday off in lieu of another day we’re supposed to have off later in May, but it also falls in the middle of a week so they put them together.

The teaching is going well enough. I feel like I have a reasonable amount of control of my classes…on most days. I’ve created a poster for “Today’s Superstar” (it’s laminated and everything) to provide some extra motivation. It’s helping a bit, but the extremely “too cool for school” type of child isn’t really taking as much notice as hoped. The winner gets his or her name written on the poster (in white board marker so that it can be erased for the next class) and a special sticker or sometimes candy.
As much as I’m not supposed to…I have favourites. I don’t show it, no worries. From my “Smurfs”, there are a few including, Lucas, Kayla, and Olivia. Lucas goes into this hyperventilating laughter at the smallest thing, like shaking hands with puppets I use. Kayla is just starting to gain confidence with English so when she says something clearly without me prompting her I try to make a bit of a fuss to encourage her. This makes her flap her arms, kind of like I used to when I was little, and laugh. Olivia is pretty much standing at attention ready to dance as soon as I reach for a CD. Stay tuned for more travel updates and student profiles J